Increasingly, the health care industry is turning to electronic medical devices to assist in the treatment of medical conditions. These electronic medical devices will often be part of a system of devices that are configured to communicate with one another over a variety of communication protocols. Further, many of these devices communicate data that is used to provide treatment to the patient. For instance, a blood glucose meter may communicate an amount of bolus to deliver to an insulin pump. As can be appreciated, the sensitivity of such communications cannot be overstated. Thus, developers must take extra care to ensure that these devices are able to properly communicate in a wide variety of conditions.
Testing the communications interfaces on (medical and non-medical) devices has traditionally required that a developing entity build or buy a debugging tool for each communications interface on the device. These debugging tools are configured to communicate with the device being tested using the communication protocol(s) of the device. This approach, however, is inefficient as for every new product using a new protocol, the developing entity must construct or purchase a new tool to debug and test the communication interfaces of the new product. Further, as new communication protocols are developed, developers must develop new debugging tools to support the new communication protocols. Thus, there is a need to provide a generic, extensible framework for communication interface debug/test tools. Further, there is a need for an extensible user interface that provides for the ability to update command definitions used to debug devices being tested.
The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure.